The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (34 page)

It was during this period that U.S. air in Laos finally peaked. It had already been increased 100 percent in June, and was again being increased significantly. The Laotian air war now involved up to three hundred fighter-bomber sorties a day - a rate equal to that flown at the height of the air campaign against North Vietnam.
[146]
Ravens were directing an average of 120 sorties a day, and on some occasions there were only three of them available to do so. Each Raven had to manage forty sorties, flying as many as six combat missions a day, and often returning to base in just over an hour because they had fired all their marking rockets. ‘It was like taxi cabs in Times Square, with fighters coming in from every direction,’ Polifka said. ‘And when you are working from five minutes after takeoff until five minutes before landing, you get damned tired.’

It was an irony that U.S. air activity over Laos was reaching its peak at the very moment the ‘secret’ nature of the war was being disclosed. Ambassador Sullivan, together with air attaché Robert Tyrrell, had been summoned before a Senate committee back in Washington to give an account of the war in Laos at a closed hearing. The hearing, which lasted for three days, often took the form of an interrogation. The substance of the hearing would remain classified for several months, but Sen. J. William Fulbright stated in an interview on October 28 that U.S. involvement in Laos was a ‘major operation’ run by the CIA and approved by the past three administrations.

One of the results of the hearing before the Senate was that a bevy of high-ranking Air Force officers started to take an interest in the war in Laos and began to arrive at Long Tieng. Visitors included the head of the 7th Air Force, Gen. George Brown, and the head of the 7/13th Air Force, Gen. Robert L. Petit. The Air Force, as ever, was anxious to exert more control over the ‘major operation’ so many of their assets were being used in.

It seemed to the Ravens that while the Air Force had given them so many more sorties to handle, it was somehow trying to trick them into breaking the Romeos. Napalm was not allowed to be used against structures, yet endless flights of Phantoms arrived on station carrying nothing else. They would be followed by RF-4 reconnaissance planes, which made passes after every Air Force strike to photograph the results.

In the vanguard of their first sustained tactical success, Ravens became blatant in their disregard for the rules. Polifka talked F-4 pilots reluctant to go against the rules into making a strike. ‘Look, nobody’s going to know if you drop nape. You have got to go on the ground and see if nape is dropped. I don’t think 7th Air Force is going to do that.’ Byers simply logged false coordinates, recording the genuine ones for himself in parentheses. ‘I did it a lot.’

And then two weeks after West Wind had been launched, reports began to come in that the targets hit behind the buffer zone were not all enemy, although Ravens who flew in the vicinity saw only large amounts of propositioned enemy supplies and found the absolute lack of visible civilian population eerie. The Meo advance had been so rapid they had outrun their own intelligence, and the area Vang Pao had designated as a free-fire zone contained large pockets of friendlies.
[147]
At a CIA staff meeting Byers asked the general about it.

‘Ooooh, very bad,’ Vang Pao said, wincing.

A terrible miscalculation had been made, and the general knew it. ‘I think we made a horrible mistake there,’ Byers said, ‘the only one that happened while I was there.’

By December 1969, the North Vietnamese had built up their forces. The new troops in the 312th Division had become rapidly experienced by necessity and began to put intense pressure on the forward, mountaintop positions. Black Lion’s fastness of Phou Nok Kok seemed to take the worst beating of all.

The enemy pounded the hill with half a dozen large 85mm mortars and had placed two 37mm antiaircraft guns on a mountaintop level with the position and only a kilometer away. Black Lion’s troops were shot at all day, every day. It seemed to the A-1 pilots who flew up from Nakhon Phanom to help out that the whole mountaintop was on fire. ‘It was a fantastic sight,’ Maj. Al Preyss, one of the pilots, said, ‘where you could almost have said it was pretty if you weren’t aware of the havoc it was bringing and the destruction ... It must take just a fraction of a second for that 37mm to fire its seven-round clip, and they have a beautiful red tracer to them.’ The guns were putting the shells directly onto Black Lion’s position. It must have taken some sort of fantastic courage, Preyss thought, to stay there day after day.

It was growing dark, visibility was about two miles, and the presence of antiaircraft guns meant the A-1 pilots could not operate with their lights on, so were unable to see one another. But despite the poor conditions the pilots felt Black Lion was in such trouble they would try to help somehow. ‘You could just hear in his voice the pressure of the moment,’ Preyss said. ‘He was really being hammered... He was literally pleading for us to come over there.’

The Skyraiders flew over to the hilltop with their load of napalm, CBU-14 (small packaged hand grenades), and bombs. They attacked the guns, using the burning nape on the ground as a reference, and were shot at continuously. ‘We kept expending ordnance,’ Preyss said, ‘and Black Lion kept calling us to drop more, drop more, expend everything, and we told him we were doing our best and how tough our situation was. And he just kept pleading, and I really mean
pleading
.’’

The A-1s stayed on station for over an hour before climbing back into the clouds, having dropped all of their ordnance. Black Lion continued to plead for help. They still had 20mm ammunition for their guns and decided to drop flares through the clouds, then ask Black Lion if he could see where the guns were in relation to them.

‘So he gave us directions and we rolled in from about ten thousand feet,’ Preyss said, ‘pointed straight at the ground, and fired our 20mm and actually pulled off going through the clouds. It lit up inside of the cloud like a Christmas tree and the flashes were so bright that I had to put my head down in the cockpit and fly instruments on the pull-up.’
[148]
Black Lion’s position had survived another day, but could not last.

Gen. Vang Pao gave a tremendous
baci
the night before Karl Polifka, Bob Dunbar, and Al Daines left Laos. Just before the festivities began, Mike Byers returned to the hootch to find a young man dressed in Air Force tans and wearing 1505s (the Air Force’s tropical uniform) with second lieutenant’s bars, accompanied by an older, stocky man in a sports jacket - possibly the only one in Long Tieng. Byers eyed the Air Force officer with suspicion. If uniformed REMFs were going to be regular visitors to the secret base he figured it was time to move on.

Unaware that the short man in the sports jacket was none other than General Petit of the 7/13th Air Force, and the officer his aide, Byers merely grunted at the two strangers and poured himself a large drink on his way to his room, where he changed before going on to the
baci
.

The party proved to be a wild and emotional occasion. The general was losing three good men and he knew it, and toasts in White Horse and
lau lao
followed one upon another in rapid succession. When it came time for Vang Pao to toast the departing Ravens he produced a bottle of exquisite old French cognac - although the level of intoxication was such they would have equally enjoyed a beaker of rubbing alcohol. By the time the American contingent staggered from the house, with strings tied from their wrists to their elbows, everyone - except Dames, a teetotal Mormon - was extremely drunk. The CIA men returned to their bar to carry on with the party, and it was there that an unfortunate incident occurred, related with relish ever after throughout the Indochina theater.

General Petit, still dressed in civilian clothes, stood at the bar, accompanied by the aide in his starched summer uniform. The young aide was anxious to please, and attempted to engage those around him in conversation. A CIA paramilitary officer, called Igor, took a deep, instinctive dislike to him. The young aide compounded the situation by breaking one of the cardinal rules of the Other Theater - never ask a CAS guy a direct question. The lieutenant thought he was making innocent conversation when he introduced himself and asked Igor who he was and what he did. Igor growled into his drink.

He was a large man, with a reputation for having a short temper, and he became violent when drunk. Without saying a word, Igor grabbed the young aide by the scruff of the neck and thrust him through the bar’s large plate-glass window onto the top of the bear cage. Floyd, who had been drinking heavily along with the group, seemed to sense that the human sprawled above him was an unwanted interloper. He began to make savage swipes with his claws through the bars, while the aide’s dancing feet beat a tattoo on the bars of the cage, a performance much enjoyed by the assembled partygoers.

General Petit was assaulted in a friendly manner by Stan Wilson, who was the worse for wear after a week’s binge in which he had failed to take a shower. ‘How the fuck are you?’ Clean Stanley asked cheerfully, as he applied a hammerlock to the general. ‘You stupid old son of a bitch.’ As more and more drink was consumed, things continued their rowdy, downhill course. At 3:00 in the morning Dunbar decided to get back to the Raven hootch by walking across the roofs. Drunken CIA men threw darts at him through the bar’s broken window as he tottered along his way. He tried to clamber into the room shared by Terry ‘Moose’ Carroll and Mike Byers, who fought him off with a board.

Byers had gone to bed early, and relatively sober, in order to take a T-28 on the dawn patrol. He rose at 5:30, took a shower and shaved, and was drinking a cup of coffee in front of the map that covered one wall of the hootch when General Petit entered. Byers used the map as a meditation aid to help him concentrate his thoughts on the coming day. He hardly looked up at the stranger.

He was still unaware of ‘the little dude’s’ identity, vaguely imagining him to be a new CIA case officer. General Petit looked about him with scarcely concealed disgust. Manuel Espinosa had gone home, leaving the Ravens without a cook once again, and the hootch had degenerated into bachelor squalor.

‘Good morning, young man,’ the general said stiffly. ‘And what are you going to do today?’

Byers nodded toward the map. ‘Right up here on Route 7 there’s sixteen - maybe eighteen - trucks and I’m going up there to blow them up.’

‘Have you got any photos of them?’

‘Oh boy, I wish I could get that. I can’t get a thing off a goddam Air Force recce. They can’t take a picture for sour owl shit. But I know they’re there and we’ll blow them up.’ Byers winked. ‘You bet.’

The stranger in the sports jacket did not seem to like the course the conversation had taken. ‘I don’t think they are there,’ he said in a voice that was stern and commanding. ‘I think you drop those bombs anywhere.’

‘You’re right,’ Byers said, picking up his gear to go out and fly. ‘I just drop them and those dumb motherfuckers drive underneath them.’

It was not until he returned at midday that he learned how much he had angered the general in command of the 7/13th Air Force. The general’s morning had been as disturbing as his night, and he had been infuriated by one final incident before he left Long Tieng in disgust. In the corner of the operations shack was a body bag containing the remains of an F-105 pilot, which had been brought in by a CIA case officer.

No one seemed to give it a second thought as they went about their business, and the callous indifference shown to a fellow Air Force officer killed in combat made the general’s blood run cold.

‘What is that?’ he asked a Raven, indicating the body bag.

‘Some Thud jock one of the CAS guys bagged and brought back - sitting over there till we can get him on a flight to Udorn for positive ID.’

‘I
meant
what is it doing dumped in a corner like that?’

The Raven looked over toward the body bag as if he were inspecting it, and there was a long pause while he pondered the question. ‘Not a whole goddam lot.’

General Petit returned to Udorn with a nightmare version of the Air Force operation up at Long Tieng. The Ravens were undisciplined, ill-dressed, and insubordinate, lived like animals in filthy quarters, and spent their time in drunken native revels. His aide had been brutalized by drink-crazed CIA men who had jammed him into a cage with two savage drunken bears. The general himself had been similarly insulted by a filthy, drunken CIA mechanic. Worst of all, they displayed a monstrous lack of respect for fellow Air Force officers killed in combat. He could only assume that the excellent bomb damage assessment the Ravens always seemed to report was manufactured and, in reality, nothing more than gross exaggeration: ‘The Raven FACs at Long Tieng are nothing but a ragged band of Mexican bandits.’

The Ravens rather liked that Joe Bauer, a newly arrived intelligence officer, sent off for posters of Zapata and Pancho Villa, which were stuck up on the walls of the hootch. With Christmas only days away the Ravens posed for a group photograph, variously hung about with bandoliers of T-28 ammo, marking rockets, and Meo muskets. One or two clamped knives between their teeth. They signed it and sent it down to Udorn as the Raven Christmas card: ‘With love to General Petit - from the Mexican
banditos
.’